This is a BBC recording of the complete Parsifal given by Sir Mark Elder and the
Hallé at the London Proms last year, issued on the Hallé label as a 70th
birthday present for Sir Mark in June this year. It sounds remarkably well,
considering the Royal Albert Hall was the ‘studio’, and the performance itself
is superb in every respect. Personally I find the work something of an acquired
taste, but it’s clear that Si Mark has acquired it, and he sustains the
atmosphere of rapt contemplation throughout (he calls it a ‘one-shirt work’ in
contrast to the other Wagner music dramas for which at least two shirts’ worth
of perspiration is needed). If you can handle hearing all those Dresden Amens
(a Lead-Kindly-Leitmotif, if ever there was one), then this is for you, too.

Sir Mark and the Halle have already recorded VW’s
symphonies 1, 2, 5 and 8 to considerable acclaim, and this is an equally
notable document. The works are each in their own way ‘war’ symphonies, the
fourth dissonantly angry and full of foreboding (though with beautiful melody,
too), the sixth seen by many as post-war reaction to the horror of Hiroshima,
with its long, almost featureless and eery finale. Sir Mark always brings freshness
and clarity to his music, and this is no exception.

Scriabin’s earlier works are being championed by Vasily
Petrenko and the Oslo Philharmonic, and offer a few surprises to the listener
who (like most of us) does not know them as regular concert repertoire. They’re
closer in style to the high Romantic vein of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov than
Scriabin’s most visionary, later music, which makes them a rewarding experience
in the hands of such a great-sounding orchestra as this and its highly gifted
conductor – also music director of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. On the
other hand, they’re somewhat uneven, the major example of this being the finale
of the second symphony, where after a seriously discursive first two movements
(like a vast slow introduction and allegro), a beautiful Andante and a lively
scherzo, descends into mere vainglorious posturing where something much
weightier is needed. But well worth hearing for the beauties along the
way.

As debut discs by solo violinists go, this is an
exceptionally rewarding and entertaining one. Joo Yeon Sir’s technique is
fabulous, and she is recorded by Andrew Keener and produced by Matthew Cosgrove
– both signs of superb quality. She and Irina Andrievsky play the charming
pastiche (or is it?) Suite in Old Style
by Schnittke, Falla’s Suite Popular Española,
Britten’s youthfully spiky Suite for
Violin and Piano op. 3, Milhaud’s Le
Boeuf sur le Toit, and Frolov’s Concert
Fantasy on themes from ‘Porgy and Bess’ – what’s not to like? Highly
recommended.

A great idea to fill a CD with new, or mainly new,
settings of Christmas music, sung by Kantos, the choir of emerging professional
singers of the north west, conducted by their director Elspeth Slorach. There
are many little gems here (though, as with any collection of such a kind, the
quality of the material varies), among them Paul Ayres’ Hodie Christus natus est, Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s This Time is born a Child, Andrew
Cusworth’s Of a Rose, Peter Maxwell
Davies’ Child of the Manger, Andrew
Mayes’ Christmas Music and Mark
Hewitt’s Silent Night setting – and
the title piece, by Colin Hand.

Adam Gorb: Dancing in the
Ghetto and other works (Royal Liverpool Philharmonic 10/10 Ensemble, conducted
by Clark Rundell; Royal Northern College of Music Wind Ensemble, conducted by
Mark Heron and Timothy Reynish; Manchester Camerata, conducted by Mark Heron:
Prima Facie PFCD047)

This collection of recent works for large ensembles by
the Royal Northern College of Music’s head of the school of composition – whose
highly crafted writing I always find stimulating and usually very enjoyable – has
two pieces with the kind of over-the-top, klezmer-influenced, knees-up dance
rhythms he’s so good at (Dancing in the
Ghetto and Weimar), along with
his Symphony no. 1 in C, which is
light-hearted, a little bit referential and enormous fun, and Serenade for Spring, which does exactly
what it says on the tin. The last piece, Love
Transforming, is a long, slow, deeply felt single movement written for
Timothy Reynish’s 75th birthday concert and a very different kind of
music, but equally intense. I was there for the concert when it was unveiled,
and though the recording cannot capture the spatial effects it creates
alongside exploring fascinating timbres, I’ll stick to my verdict then that it
is ‘both evocative and a model of
how to write clearly and imaginatively for unusual textures’.

A collection of pieces written over the past 30 years by
Adam Gorb’s predecessor at the RNCM, Anthony Gilbert, this links them together
by imagining a journey through history from the 9th century to the
20th, with music for voice, instruments, cello, piano, string
quartet and string orchestra. The stand-out for me is Another Dream Carousel, an evocation of Viennese life prior to the
Nazis’ horrors – I admired the Northern Chamber Orchestra’s playing of this
when it was new in 2000 and it’s good to have it on this disc.

Sunday, 3 December 2017

The Hallé’s annual performance of Messiah has a venerable tradition. Begun
by Charles Hallé in December 1858, it’s been the subject of interpretations by
some of its great permanent conductors and for many years an exercise in the
grand effects of massed choral singing beloved of our forebears. Barbirolli,
theatrically, used to have his choir shout the last ‘Hallelujah!’ of the
allegro tempo as loud as they could – that certainly made you jump!

This year’s conductor, John Butt, is from a
different stable. His award-winning recordings of great choral works of the
baroque period, Messiah among them,
are usually made with very small forces and represent, as closely as
scholarship can define, the original details of a particular performance.

Someone once said that if you want to
imitate the performance conditions Handel faced, you should stage the smallest
orchestra you think you can get away with, and then make sure that they
outnumber the chorus. But there’s no chance of that in a Hallé performance in
the big space of the Bridgewater Hall (which was virtually sold out on
Saturday) – so what we had was historically informed, rather than historically
authentic.

It was a brilliant success in practice.
John Butt performed the work without cuts, and brought a sense of the lively,
dancing rhythms of much of Handel’s music, a near-operatic pace, as the units
of the first part (in particular) unfold like scenes on a stage, and a good ear
for dramatic effect, which Handel’s instincts provide and which can be
leveraged well enough in an enlarged setting such as this without deserting the
sound qualities of the original instrumentation (the chattering oboes
duplicating the violin lines are always really effective).

He didn’t completely buy into Barbirolli’s
idea that the chorus should begin ‘Glory to God’ sotto voce, to fulfil the ‘da lontano’ marking and make the angels
glide into our foreground as if on the wing, but he had their accompanying
trumpets up on high, sounding from the very heavens.

And for the final chorus he threw modesty
to the winds and had Christopher Stokes open up the resources of the Marcussen
organ (instead of a chamber instrument) for once, to accompany the choral peroration
– a spine-tingling moment.

His soloists were a gifted quartet:
outstanding among them the tenor Thomas Walker, who brought the arresting style
of baroque opera to his recitatives and was outstanding in the Passion music,
and Mhairi Lawson, who beamed like an angel, with the glow of telling the
Gospel story as if we’d never heard it before. They, and mezzo Anna Stéphany
and baritone Robert Davies, were perfectly on-message with baroque
embellishments and shakes – although I noticed that ‘I know that my Redeemer
liveth’ was closer to the Victorian preference for effect through simplicity,
and none the worse for it.

The Hallé Choir sang with consistent
precision and excellent attack, particularly in ‘O Thou that tellest’, ‘Surely
He hath borne our griefs’ and, of course, ‘Hallelujah!’ – well worth standing
for. Tradition has its place, and there is still a thrill in seeing an entire
house acknowledge the presence of the King of Kings.

(The historical note in the printed
programme needs some adjustment, particularly if it’s to be used again any
time. Charles Hallé’s first Messiah in
Manchester was in December 1858, when he began a ‘Manchester Choral Society’
series – with his new orchestra and alongside his other concerts – that
continued until 1861. The only reason the oratorio doesn’t feature in the
collected programmes of his orchestral concerts until later is that, although there
was a ‘repetition’ added to the latter in March 1859, subsequently the Choral
Society series included the work in December 1859 and December 1860: only when
the two series were amalgamated in 1861 does the December Messiah appear as part of the ‘new look’ season. Look at the concert
records and contemporary newspapers and it’s all there. And Sims Reeves, the
great Victorian soloist, was a tenor.)

Thursday, 9 November 2017

Ryan Wigglesworth, principal guest
conductor of the Hallé, gave a programme for this week’s ‘Opus One’ concert
that would have seemed outrageously heavyweight for that audience a few years
ago. But it wasn’t, and the reception for Mahler’s fourth symphony showed just
how much the traditionally ‘popular’ Opus One repertoire has come closer to
that of the reputedly ‘heavy’ Thursday series.

He began with Mozart, and a concert aria to
boot, which certainly won friends and influenced people. Joanne Lunn, the soprano
who stepped in to replace Elizabeth Watts, was a charming performer of Ch’io mi scordi di te? – a classical
stylist whose voice quality betrays hidden depths and holds manifest richness. In
partnership with Ryan Wigglesworth (who directed and played the piano part
Mozart originally wrote for himself), the piece was poised and elegantly
phrased, with a controlled burst of passion for ‘Stelle barbare …’ and a degree
of agitation perceptible in the final stanza (and some fiercer wind playing in
its reprise).

More Mozart followed, keeping the chamber
orchestra sized team of strings for his Symphony
no. 34 (K338). It’s intellectual weight is in the first movement, which was
taken at a sober pace for vivace,
allowing for crisply articulated lines, some moments of foreboding and a grand
gesture to end with. Perhaps Ryan Wigglesworth was seeking impact and
profundity in the slow movement, too, among its graceful melodic shapes and
occasional harmonic surprises, but I’m not sure there was much there to be
found. The finale – an overture in all but name, with an ear-worm of a main
theme – produced even and efficiently busy string playing from the Hallé, led
by Paul Barritt.

Then it was time for Mahler. Symphony no. 4 is considered one of his
most ‘approachable’, on account of its gentle melodies and cheerful themes
associated with the Des Knaben Wunderhorn song that concludes the work, and in
this reading it began all grace and gradual transition, with skillfully
balanced textures and contrasts of woodwind tone the most telling aspect of the
playing.

But of course there is something more
macabre to come, and it made itself more apparent in the playfulness of the
second movement, the symphony’s scherzo. Ryan Wigglesworth followed all the
score’s directions to the letter, with never any additional stroke of drama.
There was warmth from the horns in chorus and silvery beauty from the strings
in the long slow movement, with peace and goodwill its dominant aspect, even in
the ‘surprise’ gesture at its close, which was neat if not exactly startling.

Joanne Lunn returned to sing the solo of
‘Das himmlische Leben’ in the final movement, with beautiful pianissimo and a
lovely portamento for St Ursula. The movement’s last defiance was an emphatic blast
at the repetition of the opening theme of the whole work – a nice touch.

Monday, 6 November 2017

The BBC Philharmonic plunged into music of
the 21st century on Saturday at the Bridgewater HalHall, with Simone Young conducting
and Jonathan Biss their piano soloist.

(It was balanced with Beethoven and Elgar,
but more of that later).

Brett Dean’s Testament, in its 2008 revision for orchestra, was a stimulating
beginning. It’s inspired by Beethoven’s ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ – the unsent
letter in which he grappled with thoughts of suicide (‘Testament’ in this
context = a will, to be read after one’s death) but resolved to pursue his
calling as a musician in spite of encroaching deafness.

The composer’s description itemizes a
three-stage process of ‘leave-taking, an acceptance and a fresh start’, and
that’s certainly mirrored in the music. It was played with care and
considerable precision, Yuri Torchinsky in the leader’s chair of the Phil.

The other novelty – Sally Beamish’s Piano Concerto no. 3, ‘City Stanzas’ – was
premiered in January this year and written (at Jonathan Biss’s request) explicitly
to ‘partner’ Beethoven’s first piano concerto. Beamish says it was affected by
the political situation in the UK and USA as she composed it last year, and
that it’s ‘darkly sardonic’ in all three movements. I have the impression that
its concept changed as she worked on it, and that the intention to write
something about urban landscapes took on grimmer aspects without completely extinguishing
the more light-hearted aspects which she may have had in mind originally.

Its structure follows that of the Beethoven
concerto, with the marching rhythms of its opening turned quite militaristic
and grotesque, and its ‘second subject’ making a strong and near-lyrical impression,
though with heavy tread. The slow movement’s bleak sound, with gloomy chords
from the piano and lugubrious woodwind solos, is a real lament for something
lost. The finale catches Beethoven’s lightness and wit – a touch of dance band music
included – but ends with a good deal more anger than he put in: a testament to
2016’s politics, I guess.

Jonathan Biss played the solo part with
love and expertise, and the BBC Philharmonic backed him all the way. In the actual
Beethoven Piano concerto no. 1 (which
preceded the Beamish concerto), we had a stylistic mix, with the orchestra’s
beginning in attempts to inject lightness and classical articulation to their
sound but reverting more to their tried-and-tested tutti quality as time went
on. Jonathan Biss was a model of classical decorum, but added telling passion
and drama in the course of the first movement – almost as if a new music was
being invented before our very eyes. The slow movement had a poised solo with
muscular accompaniment.

The concert ended with Elgar’s ‘Enigma’ Variations. The Phil, of
course, can play this with their eyes shut, and the accent in some places was
again on muscularity, with a big finish that brought an enthusiastic reception.
It was in the quieter and gentler movements, however, that their best qualities
came out.

Sunday, 29 October 2017

The most substantial of Sir Mark Elder’s
three opening programmes with the Hallé for the 2017-18 season came last (after
an Opus One set and a Thursday concert), on Saturday, as a ‘Hallé Collection’
evening.

Unusually, it was a ‘Beyond the Score’
night, with a single work in focus, illustrated and illuminated first by a
film-plus-actors sequence, with musical extracts played by the Orchestra and
Sir Mark, and then the full piece done ‘straight’, after the interval.

These presentations, devised by Gerard McBurney
for the Chicago Symphony, have been used by the Hallé twice before – the ‘New
World’ symphony and the Enigma Variations being the subject-matter. This was
altogether weightier historical subject matter: Shostakovich’s Symphony no.4.

In fact there’s so much to be said about
the fourth symphony – withdrawn from the public on the eve of its première in
1936, in the wake of the ‘muddle instead of music’ campaign against
Shostakovich (most probably directly inspired by Stalin) and never heard until
December 1961 – that contextualizing it fully, even with abundant clips from
old Soviet newsreels and projections of contemporary posters, with excerpts
from letters and speeches by key players in the drama – was bound to be an
impossible task.

The printed concert programme, striving for
background to the background, gave us much information but didn’t explain whose
voices we were hearing or what the origins of the clips were. So it was an
impressionistic glimpse of an alien and terrible time that came across: powerful
if not informative, and veering towards a message that certain parts of the
work were ‘about’ such things as factory output, poverty and deprivation, sport
and recreation, home and family, and so on.

In fact the music spoke more clearly when
it was ‘about’ nothing but itself. And that was in the second half, as Sir Mark
piloted the orchestra through a performance that seized and maintained tension
from the outset. The fourth is a massive, sprawling symphony that seems like
Mahler’s constructions in some respects, employs an orchestra of the size he
would have liked, and uses its potential for massive effects and
chamber-music-like interludes in a somewhat similar way.

One challenge of performing it is to
maintain a continuing musicality, particularly through the long first movement
– as Günther Herbig did when he conducted it with the BBC Philharmonic for the Hallé/Phil
Shostakovich cycle in 2010. As then, there were outstanding solos from the wind
instruments along with bitingly satirical episodes, and Elder’s string section
has a silky tenderness that fits the mood of the quieter music in both the
first two movements beautifully.

And Elder found a trudgingly determined
pace for the funereal (and Mahlerian, if you think of his first symphony) tune
of the slow movement, fatalistic yet determined, with incredible intensity and
wonderful lyricism alongside it. This was truly the emotional heart of the
work.

By contrast, the finale bounced along with
heady optimism and dashed into its Keystone Cops, clown-style sequence with
zest. The big (mock?) peroration was powerful in the extreme – making the
doom-laden epitaph to it all the more harrowing.

It was a great performance. The one
question I’d have liked to have considered was this: when Shostakovich wrote
the fifth symphony, as ‘a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism’, had he
really undergone a change of heart musically?

Friday, 20 October 2017

Opera North’s season of ‘The Little Greats’ is bringing six
short operas to The Lowry, in pairs, from November 15 to 18, with a Saturday
matinee of one also available on the 18th. Thanks to the generosity of Opera
North, I saw them all in Leeds, in slightly different combinations from the
Salford ones, so this is a preview/review.

First off on this side of the Pennines are the classic pair
of Italian ‘verismo’ tragedies, Mascagni’s Cavalleria
Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci,
only in this case Pagliacci comes
first. On the Thursday it’s Ravel’s L’Enfant
et les Sortilèges, followed by a rarity from Janáček - Osud (meaning Destiny). On the Friday two lighter, shorter works
take the stage with Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble
in Tahiti and Trial by Jury by
Gilbert & Sullivan, and on the Saturday L’Enfant
et les Sortilèges is repeated in the afternoon, and then Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana recur in the evening.

Pagliacci,L’Enfant et les Sortilèges and Osud were all originally slated to be
conducted by Aleksandar Markovic when he was the company’s music director. He
left somewhat abruptly in the summer, and Tobias Ringborg, already part of the
season’s conducting team, has stepped up to the rostrum for Pagliacci (he was already down for Cavalleria Rusticana and Trouble in Tahiti) and Martin André has
taken over L’Enfant and Osud. Oliver Rundell conducts Trial by Jury.

In the event, the entire enterprise is a great example of Opera
North’s ensemble philosophy, with principal singers in one production popping up
in support roles in another and chorus members frequently stepping into the
limelight, and it seems only natural that set and lighting design for all six
productions is by Charles Edwards, and there’s a common front cloth showing the
assembled team – directors, performers, chorus and all – in a group photograph.

Edwards directs Pagliacci,
and his reinterpretation of the ‘strolling players’ story uses the idea of an
opera company in rehearsal. So the performers are themselves – concept photos
of the other operas are visible on the rehearsal room walls, and the chorus are
first heard sitting down practising their notes. Props that will recur in other
Little Greats shows are simply lying around.

It’s not so much ‘On with the motley’ as off with it, most
of the time – though Peter Auty, as Canio the tragic clown, gets to wear his
face-paint and wig for the ‘final run-through’. Nedda (Elin Pritchard) is
having an affair with the conductor, Silvio (Phillip Rhodes).

It all begins with Tonio (Richard Burkhard) giving the
prologue, suitably adapted, in English (‘You’ll see a company rehearsing an
opera’), though the story itself is sung in Italian – until in the final line
Tonio reverts to English to shout that ‘The performance is over’. It’s almost a
motto piece for the entire series (though I hope this verismo does not extend to real stabbings behind the scenes at
Opera North).

Cavalleria Rusticana
is a masterpiece that sprang full formed from its creator Mascagni’s youth and
which, arguably, he never excelled. It’s been popular for excerpting from the
day it was written (Charles Hallé conducted the much-loved Intermezzo in
concert in his later years), and that, the Easter Hymn and the Brindisi
(drinking song) pop up everywhere.

It has the reputation of being the first ‘verismo’ opera,
with a degree of truth to real life that the art form had never created until
then. It is true to its title of ‘melodrama’, and, if any opera deserves the
reputation of being a shabby little shocker, this is surely it.

Karolina Sofulak’s production shifts it in both space and
time from 19th century Sicily to Poland in the 1970s – Catholicism
is still the background, but it’s in the ‘greyness’ and scarcities of a
subjugated society, as well as the treatment of young women, that she sees
parallels. The only clear locale is a shop, and there is no visual equivalent
of a church, just a wooden panel with a cross on it – for some reason, the
scorned Santuzza’s former lover Turiddù (who is ultimately to die for his
seduction of Alfio’s wife, Lola) climbs on to it with arms outstretched like a
crucifix at one point, though I couldn’t see why.

The great virtue of this offering is that it has the same
two outstanding women principals as does Osud: Giselle Allen is Santuzza, and
Rosalind Plowright is Lucia (Turiddù’s mother). Turiddù is Jonathan Stoughton,
a young British tenor with a big voice making his only contribution to The
Little Greats with this role, and Phillip Rhodes is a highly convincing Alfio –
we see him as a decent bloke and possessor of the only decent little car in
town, driven to vengeful murder as he realizes his marriage is utterly
adulterated.

Annabel Arden directs L’Enfant
et les Sortilèges in a manner that, like her other best work for Opera
North, is faithful to the score and the book but full of imaginative touches. The
Child (Wallis Giunta) has his hand-held electronic device to engage his
attention at the outset, rather than listen to his Mother (Ann Taylor): what
youngster today wouldn’t? Fflur Wyn, Quirijn de Lang, Katie Bray, John Graham
Hall, John Savournin, Lorna James, Kathryn Walker, Victoria Sharp and Rachel J
Mosley complete the cast – the sort of team only an ensemble enterprise of this
kind could provide for Ravel’s 45-minute fantasy.

It’s definitely on with the motley in the costume department,
as chairs, teapot, fire, wallpaper figures, cats, squirrel, storybook princess
and the rest all come to life, following Colette’s delicious libretto. The
story, with its hints at adolescent awakenings alongside dawning awareness of
the need to help one’s fellow-creatures as a child grows up, in Annabel Arden’s
version retains an innocence that’s wholly appropriate.

Osud is an early
work by Janáček but requires considerable resources: there are 26 named roles,
it’s in three acts and takes an hour and a half – in short, a compact opera in
its own right.

It gives a fascinating insight to its composer’s own psyche,
as it’s a tale he concocted himself about a composer writing an opera in which
his own life and love are the inspiration. So it’s a story within a story (almost
a leitmotiv of the Little Greats season), and another aspect of the Janáček
characteristic of writing about emotions he’s acutely felt already.

Annabel Arden is again director, and she presents the
scenario pretty straight. She’s borrowed an idea from those who have staged
this rare piece in recent years in the Czech Republic, which is to begin in the
present day. She shows Živný, the composer (John Graham-Hall), supervising an
exam in his music conservatory, and then runs the first Act as a 20-years-ago
flashback in his mind, followed by the second Act as a 15-years-ago flashback,
returning to the present for Act Three, where the exam ends and the students
ask him about his opera. But she doesn’t change the order of the notes.

The opera is sung in English, but with surtitles also, which
with Janáček’s orchestrations helps.

There is a particularly strong cast. John Graham-Hall
brilliantly sang the title role in Opera North’s The Adventures of Mr Brouček a
few years ago; Giselle Allen (who’s done wonderful work for Opera North in the
past) is Míla, the object of Živný’s passions; and Rosalind Plowright is her mother.
Peter Auty, Richard Burkhard, Dean Robinson and Ann Taylor are there, too, and
the other roles are supplied from Opera North’s multi-talented chorus.

Trouble in Tahiti
and Trial by Jury contrast with the
bigger emotions of some of the other ‘Greats’. They come from different eras –
Leonard Bernstein’s from his early years as a composer in the 1950s, well
before West Side Story, but clearly showing some of the knacks that would go to
make that later masterpiece – Gilbert & Sullivan’s first extant collaboration
from the late-ish 19th century but before the polished gems of HMS
Pinafore and it successors.

Each has a claim to attention, though, not just because some
of their creators’ skills were embryonic when they were written, but because
some were already fully formed. (Bernstein, in particular, was already a master
of the ‘ear-worm’ of a simple melodic motif that can tug at your heart-strings
as it returns and is quoted from one number to another). Both works carry a
degree of social satire of their times – and in these productions both get
treatments which connect, albeit tangentially, to the ‘behind the scenes’ or
‘story within the story’ themes of Pagliacci in its new guise.

In Matthew Eberhardt’s productionof Trouble
in Tahiti we are in a radio studio, as the Trio who act is a kind of Greek
chorus in the score do it to make the links and jingles of the format. The
scenes unfolded are of a husband and wife who are growing apart and a child who
suffers as a result – catching the unease the fifties brought about growing
post-war affluence and soullessness.

In John Savournin’s Trial
by Jury it’s a more thoroughgoing modernization of the G&S original,
which may not be to everyone’s taste, though the audience I was part of loved
it. The period seems to be the 1930s, and the overture is obliterated by a
supposed flouncy TV showbiz reporter (borrowing the idea from Singing’ in the
Rain) outside the courtroom, establishing the re-interpretation of the plot as
that of a jilted film star suing for her offended feelings but really just
hyping up the publicity for her latest picture. Women were rare on juries in
the Thirties, but Savournin has several of them, and a woman as the Plaintiff’s
Counsel, rather than the baritone Sullivan wrote for, so the whole thing is
even more topsy-turvy than usual.

Apart from that, it’s much as G&S wrote it, with the
dotty old judge (Jeremy Peaker) the centre of most amusement. Glamorous (and
RNCM-trained) Amy Freston is The Plaintiff. This showbizzy kind of style is her
ideal milieu, and I’m happy to recall that I first heard her lovely voice
singing another work by Sullivan, back when she was still at ballet school in
London.

Tuesday, 10 October 2017

The Bridgewater Hall’s international
orchestra series opened with a visit from the Basel Symphony Orchestra, with
its Blackburn-lad (and clearly proud of it) chief conductor, Ivor Bolton.

They may not be one of those that
immediately spring to mind in lists of the world’s top ten orchestras, but the
Basel band have a sound of their own, based – at least on this showing – on 40
strings only, with their four double basses standing to play and digging their
bows in to give a firm underpinning to a bright tutti. The strings are also
capable of making a murmur of a pianissimo and everything in between, so they made
the most of the hall’s acoustic properties.

I have the impression that Bolton has
schooled them carefully for this tour, and the Lustspiel-Ouvertüre by Busoni, lightweight though it might be
thought in some ways, was a demonstration of neat ensemble, incisive
articulation, beautiful woodwind tone and a glittering climax: a very good
start.

Saint-Saëns’ Cello concerto was not as pristine in every part orchestrally, but
its great virtue was the playing of the soloist, Sol Gabetta. She was last
here in 2015, with the Dresden Philharmonic, giving a glorious interpretation
of the Elgar concerto, and she did not disappoint this time. Her tone carried
through the accompanying textures with ease; she could reduce it to a perfectly
controlled whisper, and is adept at letting a quiet phrase hang in the air almost
to the point of extinction – in short, a delight to hear. Ivor Bolton
contributed to the total effect with imaginative handling of the more cliché-like
lurches of style in the writing (with Saint-Saëns you never quite know whether
you’ll get Russian misery, Mendelssohnian gossamer or Schumannesque outbursts,
but they’re all there).

Her encore piece, Fauré’s Élégie (for which two horns who
otherwise enjoyed an easy night were brought on stage), is almost a miniature
concerto and endeared her still more to her listeners.

The meat of the evening was Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7. Hardly a novelty, of
course, and many of us have probably heard what we consider definitive
performances of it in the past. I found Ivor Bolton’s approach overdid the
portentousness and heavy drama a bit (the opening sostenuto almost lost the
will to live by its end) and though well enunciated didn’t capture all the
dance-like qualities that are there to be found.

The scherzo was instead vigorous, loud and
proud, with some rasping horn tone to emphasize the point (but more deathly
pauses). And the finale was a solid mix, with Bolton determinedly stirring the bowl.
A pretty thick raclette, in fact.

But it wowed the crowd, as did their extra
bit of Fauré – the Nocturne from his
music to Shylock.

Saturday, 9 September 2017

Manchester Camerata has made its UpClose
series into a brand in its own right these days, and in the Gallery space at
HOME, Manchester’s theatre-cinema-gallery-arts centre and its new artistic
partner, it had a venue for ‘Pocket Symphonies’ that no doubt brought an
enquiring set of new ‘experience seekers’, too.

What they found was a sequence of music
tracks realized by their composer, German creative wizard Sven Helbig, the
piano quartet parts played live under his direction by Camerata’s Adi Brett, Ann
Beilby, Hannah Roberts and Simon Parkin, alongside film created and curated
by HOME’s own Chris Paul Daniels.

That sounds pretty prosaic, but it was an
experience that held attention for most of its about one-hour duration, and the
magic was in the marriage of the music and the visuals – many of them archive
footage with a nostalgic twist, or (in one case) time-lapse shots of familiar
scenes in our own busy-bee city, woven into fascinating tapestries of
superimposition.

Biggest hit on the night was one dominated
by images of speed along a railway track, matching the pounding moto perpetuo of the score, which they
decided to make into an encore, too.

Helbig described his work – which is on an
existing album, played by full orchestra and piano quartet – as a ‘song cycle’,
and I guess that’s what it is, if you think songs-without-words. (Symphonic
they are not, though in one or two I wondered whether ‘Pocket Passacaglias’
might have fitted, with their chaconne-style variation of an underlying
four-bar unit, or sets of units).

But hey, the man comes with imprimatur of
the Pet Shops Boys and Snoop Dog, among others, as well as classical outfits,
so you know he’s not an idiot. He can certainly write effectively for piano
quartet, and his music can be plaintive, or hyper-energetic, or loads of other
things, and is very appealing (tonal all the way) within its album-track
dimensions.

Is this the way to woo listeners into the
classical world who find traditional symphonies too long? Well, at one point
(just before the railroad track) I thought perhaps an hour of one
similar-length piece after another was going to be too long. But music with
something to look at is another genre, anyway – maybe even a kind of
Gesamtkunstwerk – and if Wagner could do the maxi version, Sven can do the
mini.

Saturday, 22 July 2017

Clonter Opera has a remarkably good and
large cast to offer in its 2017 summer production, and what’s more a very
gifted and imaginative director in Stephen Medcalf, who’s come up with the idea
of keeping the location as Spain (Figaro is the former Barber of Seville,
remember?) but bringing the timing forward to that of the fascist 1930s.

It works remarkably well. You can believe
that the Count (army uniformed and a pretty nasty piece of work in this
production) might really want to have his way with Figaro’s young bride who’s
in both his clutches and his employ. Figaro’s position – smartly dressed
chauffeur and smart-brained with it – makes him an inferior and yet capable of
standing up to the boss with some success. Designer Nate Gibson pays homage to Dali and Gaudi in a
setting which is minimal (at Clonter it has to be) but evocative.

The music is in the
highly capable hands of Clive Timms, with Liz Rossi leading the Clonter
Sinfonia who play a reduced score in the tiny Clonter pit. The principals
clearly know their business and they come together very well indeed in the
ensembles.

Are there some stars
of the future at Clonter this year, as there so often have been in the past? Margo
Arsane (Susanna) and Henry Neill (Figaro) were impressive from the start. She’s
a natural stage performer, acting and reacting to the story throughout, and her
soprano is pure and clear, with power available but never over-used. He a
gifted actor-singer with well developed tone in his voice and a lot of energy
and charm. Josep-Ramon Olivé as Almaviva has confidence and stage presence,
Andrew Irwin brings a fine tenor voice and a real comic gift as both Basilio
and Curzio, while Angharad Lyddon as Cherubino sings delightfully and has
mastered the art (and walk) of being a girl playing a boy who at times is
pretending to be a girl.

Elizabeth Skinner (the
Countess) brings a lovely mature sound to her role; Eugene Dillon-Hooper is a
believable Dr Bartolo, with Jade Moffat (Guidhall) vocally strong as
Marcellina. There were valuable contributions, too, from Edward Robinson as
Antonio and Corinne Cowling as Barbarina.

Henry Neill as Figaro and Margo Arsane as Susanna in Clonter Opera's The Marriage of Figaro. Picture by Pauline Neild

Josep-Ramon Olivé as Count Almaviva in Clonter Opera's The Marriage of Figaro. Picture by Pauline Neild

Elizabeth Skinner as the Countess in Clonter Opera's The Marriage of Figaro. Picture by Pauline Neild

Wednesday, 19 July 2017

The Scott Brothers – Jonathan and Tom, organist, pianists,
composers and creative animator between them, and much besides – are appearing
in concert at Rochdale Parish Church on Saturday
22nd July, at 3pm.

The Scotts, Manchester born and
educated and still resident in Failsworth, have played in major concert halls
across the UK and venues in Europe, the Far East and South America.

Their Rochdale concert will
celebrate the arrival at St Chad’s of a magnificent and rarely-used grand piano
gifted to the church by a secret generous donor.

Jonathan, 36, and Tom, 33,
both studied at Chetham’s School of Music and the Royal Northern College of
Music, gaining major prizes. They have recorded CDs, played on network radio
music

programmes, and performed
background music for film and TV productions. Their diary of concert programmes
covers piano duo, piano and organ, and harmonium and piano.

Tom, an artist and designer
as well as a musician, is also the mastermind of a novel and original series of
animated films bringing classical music to a new audience.

And it just happens that
Tom’s talents have been employed in another fascinating direction recently.
He’s been assisting five different local groups with the ‘Tram Tracks’ project,
in which the Bridgewater Hall is celebrating its 21st birthday
alongside the 25th anniversary of Metrolink by helping to create 93
new songs, performed and recorded by over 1,200 people from across Greater
Manchester and now available free online – there’s one for each station on the
present-day Metrolink.

Tom says: ‘I worked with five schools to create songs which
represented Weaste (St Luke’s
Primary), Monsall (St Augustine’s
Primary), Navigation Road
(Navigation Primary), Ashton West
(The Heys Primary) and Radcliffe
(Chapelfield Primary).
‘I had a really great time and journeyed on the tram to each of the schools (the
schools were very close to their respective tram stops).

‘In the school workshops we discussed everything about the
tram and what it meant to the local area. It was all very positive, and we had
a chance to talk about all of the interesting elements about the places where
the children lived, and some local history which might have otherwise been
unknown.
‘Musically, we discussed pulse and rhythm in music and I taught the groups how
to conduct and form ideas when constructing music or verse. We gathered all our
ideas and wrote our songs, and after a few days I returned to rehearse and record
the tracks.

‘All the children were brilliant and enthusiastic throughout,
which really shines through on the recordings.’

And Tom has been commissioned by the Bridgewater Hall (as
part of their 21st anniversary celebration) to create a new animated film (he’s
done the story, the music and the animation) called The Composer and the Mouse. It tells the story of a talented yet
hapless composer who finds his own musical style with the help of a mouse – it’s
a fun introduction to classical music with live music and visuals aimed at a
wide range of ages. The world première will be at the Bridgewater Hall on 2nd
September at 1pm in a family-friendly concert. Meanwhile, Jonathan’s popular
organ concert series at the Bridgewater Hall continues on August 30th at 1.10pm
with a ‘Lunchtime at the Opera’ programme, and then ‘Fantastic Feet’ on 3rd
October. There’s a video about the series on www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbOFWs9XRHg.

And the brothers have been invited to perform organ and piano duos at some
international venues over the next few months, including the National Concert
Hall, Taipei, Taiwan, on 12th August and the Basilica of Santa Maria de
Montserrat, Barcelona, Spain (in the Montserrat International Organ Festival)
on 9th September at. Details of their globe-trotting and other performances are
on www.scottbrothersduo.com/CONCERTS.htm - Transports de Joie indeed.

Tuesday, 18 July 2017

Y Tŵr
(The Tower) is a two-hander opera in Welsh by Guto Puw, with libretto by
Gwyneth Glyn, based on a play of the same name by Gwenlyn Parry. It was brought
to the Buxton Festival by Music Theatre Wales after premiering at the Vale of
Glamorgan Festival in May, having been commissioned and produced jointly by
Music Theatre Wales and Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru, the Welsh-language national
theatre of Wales.

It’s about a couple, whom we see in the first flush of young love, then in
middle age, and finally when they’re old and facing death. Bit of a downer,
that last act, and if there’s a positive message of any kind it’s that in the
end they do find they’ve made a partnership of a kind that survives through
thick and thin – including his frustration in his career and her infidelity. In
each section of their lives the idea of a passing train is introduced
(sandpaper sound effects and a 'ragtimey' theme in the orchestra) and she
describes a dream about a butterfly – beautiful and quite powerful symbols
which you can interpret as you wish … the Elusive Butterfly of Love was
the song that came to mind for me.

So where does the Tower come into it? That’s also up to us to interpret, as it
seems to stand for different things at different times (in the middle act, I think
it represents his belief in ‘success’, and in the final one they speak of
having been to the top and come down again). Gwyneth Glyn’s note explains that
it’s a metaphor for their relationship and also for life’s challenges and
expectations.

We don’t actually see a tower in Michael McCarthy’s production, however – just
a ladder at the back of the stage. Nor of course do we see the train – though
the sandpaper choo-choo effect tells you it’s a steam one, which jars a bit
with the present-day costuming.

The score is subtle and at times beautiful, with some rather obvious
‘ascending’ and ‘descending’ motifs, and touching on tonal language only when
the melody of a Welsh lullaby is introduced towards the end of each act. That
brings a halo of recognition each time it comes and makes an attractive
contribution.

Everything depends on the acting and singing of the two protagonists, of
course, and they are both good: not surprisingly, Gwion Thomas (as ‘Male’) is
better at being the middle-aged and old characters than the young one, and
Caryl Hughes (‘Female’) far better as the young thing in love than her later
counterparts.

Sunday, 16 July 2017

Albert Herring is one of my favourites
among Britten’s operas. It’s a gentle comedy of English village life, as it was
just after the Second World War (even though it’s based on a French story
originally), with a libretto brilliantly written by Eric Crozier and some
priceless opportunities for characterization by the principal singers.Basically the story is that the village
committee of Loxford meet to choose a May queen, who must be a girl of
unimpeachable morals and manners – and there aren’t any in the village. So they
choose the dutiful and rather naïve Albert, who helps his mother in the
greengrocer’s shop, and make him King of the May instead. At the fete his
lemonade is spiced with rum by the young and lively couple, Sid and Nancy, and
he disappears for a night of … well, we never find out, as he tells a good but
unlikely tale when the village worthies, having convinced he must be dead,
realize he’s OK after all. He asks Nancy afterwards ‘I didn't lay it on too thick, did I?’, so what really happened in his night of self-discovery remains a
mystery.Albert Herring can work in a large opera
house and also in a small-scale setting. At Buxton, director Francis Matthews
had the opportunity to present it in an ideal environment, and with designer
Adrian Linford’s detailed and evocatively piecemeal sets – adapting quite
neatly to the changing scenes – the visual presentation was delicious. We are
reminded of the post-war time of the opera’s composition by little details of
crumbling masonry and left-over hardware from the years of conflict, and part
of the appeal of the piece is that it catches the note of liberation
(especially of young people) that was just on its cusp at the time.Musically the performance was of a very
high standard: conductor Justin Doyle has done the piece before in one of Opera
North’s interpretations and knows not only it but most of the cast extremely
well, as a number of them are Opera North regulars. Yvonne Howard as the tweedy
grande dame and moral crusader, Lady Billows, was magnificent, and Heather
Shipp brought Mrs Glum to being Albert’s mum. Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts was the
pompous ass of a mayor, Mr Upfold, and Mary Hegarty delightful as the
schoolteacher, Miss Wordsworth.Kathryn Rudge was a star in her own right
as Nancy the red-lipsticked blonde bombshell, and Morgan Pearse (whose gifts
are new to me) was a model of a singer in tone, diction and acting ability as
Sid.Lucy Schaufer, Nicholas Merryweather and
John Molloy completed the ‘adult’ cast admirably, and Sophie Gallagher and
Bonnie Callaghan as the girls Emmie and Cis were excellent (Nicholas Challier,
as young Harry, walked his part the night I went while RNCM rising star
Charlotte Trepess sang his role from the wings).Best of all was Bradley Smith as Albert, a
young singer of golden tone and impressive acting ability – never over the top
but believably engaging as the hapless Albert.However, there was one aspect of this
production which I thought intrusive and pointless. Francis Matthews has
invented a silent character he calls ‘The Stranger’ – in his trilby and
double-breasted suit I’d call him The Spiv – who seems to shadow Albert a lot and
in the long entracte between acts two and three interacts with him in a kind of
slow pas de deux.Symbolic of something? Maybe – it’s an idea
that’s been used before and adds very little to the genius of the original.

Saturday, 15 July 2017

This was a real achievement by Buxton
Festival 2017. They chose the 1847, original, version of Verdi’s first operatic
adaptation of a Shakespeare play (and he didn’t try any others until in his old
age), which gave the performance something of a collectable cachet and made it
part of a trilogy of ‘early Verdi’, with Giovanna
d’Arco last year and Alzira coming
next.

It also – fully justifiably – put the opera
into the medium-size theatre ambience it would originally have had. Buxton has
to beware of trying to do pieces that are too ‘grand’ for its stage, and it
normally keeps its chorus to a total of 16. On this occasion that number was
doubled by the inclusion of ‘Young Artists’, which was enormously worthwhile –
but the work is so taut and economical in construction and style that it seems
ideal for the intimacy of Matcham’s opera house.

In Elijah Moshinsky the festival had one of
the world’s great Verdi directors, and in festival artistic director Stephen
Barlow an equally gifted Verdi conductor. Moshinsky may not have had the kind
of spending budget he would get at the Met in New York, but he made use of
every device he could to make this the super-charged Romantic drama Verdi saw
in it. There may only have been one three-sided-box of a set and few moveable
props, mainly schoolroom benches (not much room for anything else when you have
a big chorus on stage!), but it was designed with a yawning perspective to
imply a world of mystery (Russell Craig the designer) and video projection and
sound effects were there to eke out its imperfections – weather noises for the
blasted heath, clanking and rumbling for the assembling army, and so on. The
spooky goings-on of Macbetto’s last prophetic encounter with the witches, and
the final battle, were both visually evoked by Stanley Orwin-Fraser with
considerable elaboration, though some of his imagery seemed to stray from the
descriptions in the text (which follows Shakespeare’s remarkably closely).

But the musical drama and the
characterization of the central couple were both very powerful, and Barlow and
his principals, Stephen Gadd and Kate Ladner, deserve much praise for those.
Because of the nature of the story, the other roles are relatively subservient
– Duncano (Ben Thapa) and Banco (Oleg Tsibulko) each get done in by half way
through, and Macduff (Jung Soo Yun) and Malcolm (Luke Sinclair) only come into
their own towards the end, but each role was well acted and strongly sung (as
were the lesser ones and the children’s appearances).

But Gadd and Ladner were superb, not just
individually but in the portrayal of their relationship. They seem to catch an
almost sexual charge as they plot their horrible deeds together (Ora di morte e di vendetta), in a way you imagine notorious murderer couples of more recent
history may perhaps have done.

He has an incisive timbre and the ability
to make even the hell-hound evoke some sympathy from us – she brought
richly-layered psychology to the role Verdi called ‘Lady’: evil beyond words in
the duet when she and her husband realize returning were as tedious as go o’er
– and in the sleep-walking scene able to create the kind of out-of-body
vocalization the composer wanted, while keeping well on top of his purely
musical demands.

It’s a demanding work in every sense, and
this was one of the best non-comedy operas the Buxton Festival has mounted for
some time.

Tuesday, 11 July 2017

Opera in this part of the world comes in concentrated bursts. Opera North often offer us an early week in the year and a late one, with three different shows each time, and right now we have the Buxton Festival with its three in-house productions and one from Music Theatre Wales, plus BambinO, the ‘opera for babies’ provided by Scottish Opera in the Manchester International Festival, and next week Clonter Opera in Cheshire swings into action with its main summer production, The Marriage of Figaro.
Buxton is presenting the rarely seen 1847 Florence version of Verdi’s Macbeth, Britten’s comedy Albert Herring, and (in co-production with The English Concert), Lucio Silla, an opera Mozart wrote at the age of 16.
The festival has secured a great Verdi director in Elijah Moshinsky for Macbeth, whose interest in early Verdi has already borne fruit in Giovanna d’Arco in 2015 and will continue with Alzira next year.
Stephen Barlow, now in his fifth year as artistic director of the festival, conducts Macbeth, with Stephen Gadd in the title role, Australian soprano Kate Ladner (a wonderful Giovanna in Giovanna d’Arco) as Lady Macbeth, Moldovan bass Oleg Tsibulkov in his UK debut as Banquo, and South Korean tenor Yun Soo Yun as Macduff. Remaining dates are 14, 18 and 21 July.
Justin Doyle is conductor for Albert Herring – after piloting the excellent, intimate production of the piece for Opera North four years ago, which never toured. This time it’s directed by Francis Matthews, and the cast includes Opera North favourites Yvonne Howard (Lady Billows), Heather Shipp (Mrs Herring), Mary Hegarty (Miss Wordsworth), Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts (Mr Upfold) and Kathryn Rudge (Nancy). Remaining dates are 12, 15, 19 and 22 July (the 19th is a matinee).
Laurence Cummings conducts Lucio Silla, and Harry Silverstein directs a team including Joshua Ellicott, Fflur Wyn and Rebecca Bottone, with the outstanding soprano Madeleine Pierard as Cecilio. Remaining dates are 13, 16 and 20 July (the 16th is a matinee).
Buxton is also hosting Music Theatre Wales’ new opera, Y Tŵr (The Tower) by Guto Puw – the first time a work in the Welsh language has been toured outside Wales. That’s on 17 July.
Over to Clonter for The Marriage of Figaro. There’s a public preview performance on 20 July, and main ones on 22, 24 (matinee), 25, 27 and 29 July. It’s directed by Stephen Medcalf, who’s set it in 1930s Spain during the civil war, exploring class dynamics and a strong gender divide – plus, of course, the work’s wit and heartrending emotion. It’s going to be sung in Italian with English surtitles, and Clive Timms conducts the select Clonter orchestra.
So we have plenty of operatic choice, but for a limited period only. I’ve reviewed BambinO and Lucio Silla already, and Macbeth, Albert Herring and Y Tŵr are to follow – and also The Marriage of Figaro.

Monday, 10 July 2017

Mozart was 16 when he composed this opera,
and capable of taking complete musical charge of the thing, supervising
rehearsals and so on. He’d had two previous hit operas at the theatre in Milan
(precursor of La Scala) already by 1772.

It’s getting quite trendy to explore his
early theatre works these days, and inevitably we look for pre-echoes of the
masterstrokes we know from the operas of his maturity. And some are there in
Lucio Silla: the story itself, of how a nasty despot finds enlightenment and
generosity of spirit in the end, has later parallels in Idomeneo and La Clemenza
di Tito; the imaginative use of the orchestra to convey moods of tension,
resignation, poignancy or passion as a background to the action; a scene in a graveyard
that makes you think (a bit) of Don Giovanni; and several testing arias for the
high voices, written as only Mozart could to bring out the best and most beautiful
sounds in virtuoso singers.

For this Buxton Festival/The English
Concert co-production, conducted by Laurence Cummings, the singers were well
chosen and delivered excellent results – in one case, outstandingly so. Soprano
Madeleine Pierard, in the hero’s role of Cecilio (two of the four men in this
story sing with high voices, so they’re women in ‘trouser’) was a knock-out in
her delivery of arias such as Il tenero momento and in the trio Quell' orgoglioso sdegno.

Rebecca Bottone
was also on top form, as his faithful fiancée, Giunia, looking terrific and
singing with beauty and sensitivity over a wide range (in, for instance, Frà I
pensier più funesti di morte).

Joshua Ellicott makes
the title role a study in the Roman ruler as inhuman monster … until his
last-minute change of heart. He almost chewed the scenery, until a bit of it
fell off prematurely … so he pulled all the flimsy stuff down anyway. Fflur Wyn (as Celia) and
Karolina Plicková (as Lucio Cinna, the other trouser role) were both very fine,
the former in Quando
sugl'arsi campi especially, and the latter in De più superbi il core.

As a story, Lucio
Silla certainly makes you wait for its best moments, as the happy ending only
comes around two hours and 45 minutes in, and the first night audience found
the final affirmations of sweetness and light quite amusing.

As a production
(Harry Silverstein, design by Linda Buchanan), it bore the marks of shoestring
budgeting, with one basic framework of a set, and costumes from the left-overs box. I was disappointed by the static,
all-face-the-audience presentation of the graveyard scene and others employing
the chorus. But at least it was better than a concert performance.